Do you know your Safety 1 from your Safety 2 and your Safety Differently?

Safety and risk thought leaders have moved on from the traditional thinking that loss events are prevented by ensuring as few things as possible go wrong; and towards a performance focus (almost an All Black philosophy) that involves accounting for how (imperfect) people adjust for workplace changes (complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity, goal conflicts, etc.).

I am delighted that there is a noticeable increase in LinkedIn content about this evolution. However, within those articles and posts, there is an assumption that the reader is familiar with iterations of primary theory, specifically 'Safety 1', 'Safety 2', and 'Safety Differently'. With that in mind, I thought it might add value to offer a short explanation of each...

Safety 1: This is the legacy view and defines the concept of safety as the lack of unwanted events that either did (incidents) or could have (near miss) resulted in loss. This has been a catalyst for a huge focus on process and/ or human faults that were deemed (blamed) to be either directly or indirectly contributory to the unsafe operations that resulted in the loss.

Safety 2: This more progressive approach is founded upon the principles of resilience engineering and driven by the philosophy that ‘things go wrong’ and ‘things go right’ for similar reasons. This view defines safety as the ability to succeed under varying conditions and requires a commensurate functional understanding of the operation under examination.

Safety Differently: This is a dichotomy from the the process-driven approach of Safety 1 and Safety 2, with particular concentration on the human input (far closer in terms of Human Factors, Social Psychology Of Risk, decision science, etc.). This focusses on success, rather than the legacy approach of building layers of defense to prevent loss events from occurring.

In summary, there is a compelling case for the application all three principles, especially in a hybrid form (beware this article's picture) that best accounts for the countless operational, industrial, commercial and cultural landscapes. I hope this article has added some context and understanding for you, within which what is an exciting time in risk and safety research.

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it" - Aristotle